The objective of this research is to discover and identify novel natural products from plants and microbes that are biologically active in the area of pest management and human medicine. The compounds investigated are derived from a wide variety of biosynthetic pathways. Antitoxic food components present in human diet and their metabolism and mode of action are also part of this project. Synthetic transformations of these natural products have been performed in some cases. MS techniques such as low- and high-resolution EI-MS, CI-MS, GC-MS and FAB-MS have been used extensively to help characterize many of the compounds isolated, synthesized or metabolized.